


know what it is to grow beneath her sky

by orphan_account



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, I mostly wrote this because hormones, Not Canon Compliant, Other, Polyamorous Character, Pre-Relationship, it is what it is, not a love triangle what do you take me for, post-Death of the Outsider, wrote this long-hand in tiny cramped script
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 06:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12293034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “You will never be safe,” he cautions her then, and it would be easier to hear if he sounded more like Corvo when he says such things. “But don’t go making it easier for them.“





	know what it is to grow beneath her sky

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, high five to Ms_Chunks, I guess, for being the first but not the only one anymore. This is a teeny-tiny trash vessel in comparison with the battle frigate she's captaining, but I have demons, too, and I need to let them out.
> 
> Emily is *checks* 27 years old in this, she's been through some shit, and the human-once-more Outsider has dragged Daud and Billie to Dunwall because he wanted to see her and Corvo again. If _you_ don't like this pairing (or the OT3 it's leading to because I'm not throwing Wyman under the bus here), guess what, you don't have to read it.
> 
> This is veeery broad strokes. Tiny snippets and snapshots of about two years of Tower life.

It’s a talk with the Outsider that makes Emily consider letting Billie and Daud stay at the Tower. Their story of the fight against the Eyeless is a strange one, as is Billie’s insistence that it was Emily’s kindness that helped her on her way to reclaiming her past, and seeking out the man who’d shaped so much of it.

She forgave Meagan… Billie on the ship, and she does not regret doing so. But it was done thinking they would never speak again. She offered to send her money, yes, to tide her over, to make repairs to the Dreadful Wale, to compensate her for what she’d done in aiding Emily restore her throne. She never received an answer.

She knows Corvo let Daud live not because he feared finishing him off, but because he knew that, if not Daud, someone else would have come for her mother. She knows Daud saved her, too, now; and that it cost him Billie.

The loss of her mother will never sit easier in her heart, but she knows that Burrows and Campbell were to blame for their crimes, and Daud for his — for taking their money and doing their will — but not for their hunger for power, for their disdain for an Empress that ruled with kindness instead of an iron fist. Not for the Plague that left the city to rot. He didn’t care enough not to take the job. He didn’t care enough to warn them. How different would things be if he had?

Emily is very familiar with the power of indifference. Corvo had changed the character of the City Watch, or so they’d thought. And still, so many turned on her. She’d not been the Empress she should have been; and Daud had been apart from society for so long, her mother’s righteous policies had held no sway over him. Her own turned out not to hold much water, either.

He regretted it all his life, she knows. He made no bones, no excuses, the day he arrived. He takes her disdain and her silence, and when the exercise of loathing him openly on her worse days becomes too tedious, he takes her questions, too.

About his past. About his politics, so many for a man who claims not to have them at all.

And so, they begin to argue. Policy, natural philosophy and, more acutely, ways of dealing with the gangs and the abandoned witches of Delilah’s coven.

He warns her against making the same mistakes he and Corvo made, and the first time he says it to her face, she nearly drops the book she’d been using in lieu of a sword, waving it in his face like so much steel.

“What,” she barks.

“I didn’t tell Corvo about Brigmore Manor, about the witches yet a threat to your family and out for revenge,” he says. “And Corvo should have taken more care in restructuring the City Watch. Too many of the old guard remained in place if they just denounced Burrows quickly enough.”

“We needed seasoned officers,” Emily insists.

“Then you should have kept a better eye on them,” Daud returns. “Isn’t that what you’re doing with the other kingdoms now? Instead of reading useless reports or newspapers?”

She says nothing.

“You will never be safe,” he cautions her then, and it would be easier to hear if he sounded more like Corvo when he says such things. “But don’t go making it easier for them.“

* * *

And so, Daud and Billie stay, until they don’t. Emily rested more or less comfortably in the knowledge that, where the Outsider went, so did they. The boy, for all that he is a god no more, seems content in Dunwall; seems content to explore the Tower, the city, to let people believe he is a young man seeing the world for the first time and otherwise resting in her or Corvo’s study with a book in his lap while they work and the Dunwall sky has nothing to offer but rain and hail.

Then, everything turns on a coin, as it is wont to do.

Billie and Daud start taking contracts — scouting missions, raids for blackmail material to help the victims of gang racketeers.

The worst of it is, it is Corvo who tells her. They told him, but not her, where they disappear to for days at a time. The Outsider knows, of course.

“You do realise they’re scared of you,“ Corvo teases her.

“That’s ridiculous,” she says aloud. She isn’t pleased, she tells herself. Doesn’t want them evading her gaze when there’s a new reminder of her mother — which is all the time, considering she sits on her throne. “They tell you, but not me? You nearly killed them both.”

“Only Daud,” Corvo recalls the timeline with more precision than her. “And he and I both know that our students have far surpassed us.“ He lifts his left hand, back towards her, to make his point.

Emily scoffs.

“They’ll return tonight.”

* * *

Emily catches herself looking out the window of her study for the third time that night, then rolls her eyes at herself. As if they’d let her see them. And besides, Daud’s days of scaling towers — much less Dunwall Tower — are long gone.

An hour later, the door to her study opens. The Outsider, a rare smile on his lips. “They’re back.”

He is still uncanny.

* * *

She marches downstairs to Billie and Daud’s quarters, then, the two unobtrusive rooms down the hall from Corvo’s chamber and office. She's aiming for Daud’s door without thinking, perhaps because she’s finally thought of a counter-argument to his insistence that trade relations with Serkonos and Tyvia ought to have priority over those with Morley, in light of her impending union with Wyman and the diplomatic advantage it will secure.

She meets Billie in the corridor.

“Emily,” the former assassin is startled.

Emily takes advantage of this to cover for her own surprise. “You’ve returned.”

“Yes.” Billie doesn’t offer anything else.

“Is it wise, dragging him across the rooftops at night,” she lobs the first verbal grenade.

Billie tilts her head. “Daud is no less of a fighter now than Corvo.”

“So an old dog _can_ learn new tricks?” Daud had the Mark — relied on it — for far longer than Corvo ever did.

Billie finally smirks. “Tread lightly, Your Majesty. This old dog may have lost some of his bark, but not his bite.” Then she pushes past her. Towards Corvo’s office, papers in her hand.

Emily watches her for a moment. A warning. Of Daud? Or of her own curiosity?

She takes a deep breath, sets her hand on the knob and twists.

“Ever heard of knocking?“

He sounds tired, but when he turns to face her where she shouldered open the door to his quarters, his eyes are alert and unyielding. He is shrugging on a clean shirt, and Emily has to rein in her instinctive reaction for a second time that night.

“Ever heard of reporting to your Empress?” she volleys back.

His eyebrows rise. “Isn’t Billie doing that as we speak?“ he ventures, and it’s not the part she’d have expected him to take aim at. Not the part she wanted him to. (She knows herself at least that well.)

“Last I checked, Corvo had a different shoe size.”

He grins. It still throws her when he does. “Cutting down on bureaucracy means relieving your Spymaster of his duties? How unnecessarily cruel of you.” He’s finished buttoning his shirt. She’s crossed her arms over her chest.

“Where did you go?“

Daud doesn’t answer, instead takes a bottle of whiskey from his desk and holds it up. “If you want that story told, you might as well sit down.”

She grabs two glasses from the dresser and deems them clean enough.

* * *

They’re arguing again. In Corvo’s office this time, who looks as though he is seriously considering turning them out and leaving them to have their match of wits in front of the scullery maids.

It’s about the reconstruction of the Legal District — hardly any of their disagreements are personal these days — but then why is her breath coming so fast, and why has he abandoned his pretence of tired cynicism in favour of persistent argument?

They argue less when Wyman is in Dunwall, and Emily puts it down to fewer distractions. Either that, or Daud’s needling just bothers her less when they’re with her.

It’s also during one of Wyman’s visits that Daud returns with a bolt wound in his shoulder, Billie’s face drawn with guilt.

“Idiot,” she grouses. Emily says nothing and sends a servant for Toksvig instead as they drag him to his quarters.

Daud grumbles, visibly in pain. “You had the silver graph,” he says, as if that explained everything.

“What silvergraph?” Emily interrupts.

“Something you need to see,” Billie tells her curtly. “Once we’re sure this isn’t infected.”

Wyman tugs her aside when Toksvig orders the room emptied. Billie stays, Daud glares at her. Emily doesn’t ask what happened. Daud’s injury is answer enough, she supposes.

She’s restless that night, and Wyman folds tighter around her and kisses her forehead.

“He’ll be fine.“

“I’m not worried,” Emily protests. She’s not. Not about Daud, who took an arrow to the chest to protect the one person he trusted more than any of them. Not about the silver graph he was willing to risk getting shot to make sure it reached _her_.

Wyman smiles. “I’m sure Dr Toksvig will let the Empress see him in the morning.”

* * *

Toksvig does. Daud is laid up in bed, a situation he obviously cares little for. He raises his brows at her.

“You’re the first.”

She has an early meeting — Wyman, for one, is still asleep.

“How are you?” Not what she meant to say, but she can’t take it back now.

“I won’t bore you by saying I’ve had worse,” he gripes. He doesn’t have to — his shirt is open in the front, and what she can see of his chest is covered in scars, some she knows to identify by weapon, others that are more complicated. Twisted.

“Entertain me, then,” she challenges, and sits backwards on a chair she’s pulled up from the desk.

He regards her as if she’s one of the mysteries he so famously can’t abide. Good. She wouldn’t want to be transparent — it only made one far too easily led.

“Skewered,” he drawls then, in a voice she hasn’t heard before — as if teasing her will one day cost him his head, and that’s just how it will end, as it always does for the court jester.

She grins.

* * *

Daud recovers, under the watchful eyes of Billie and Toksvig. The Outsider asks Corvo to teach him how to fish. Wyman leaves and returns and leaves again.

Emily sees the anniversary of her mother’s death — of the Coup — come and go. Billie attends the memorial. Daud does not.

She corners him in his room that night.

“What are you doing here?” he grunts.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she accuses.

“You don’t want me in that room,” he posits, and she has to swallow down that he’s been in the throne room countless times by now. The only difference is her mother’s portrait and roses littering the ground. Roses that will be ground to dust before the week is out.

“I know that you regret what happened,” she says instead. Doesn’t say, ‘what you did.’

“What do you know about regret,“ he delivers, and another day she’d needle him for becoming pedestrian. He’s in a fighting mood, then, if he doesn’t care. Well, so is she.

“I had an extraordinary teacher this past year,” she issues.

“Only this past year?” He stands, stalks towards her.

She knows what — who — she means. She’s not here to discuss Corvo, and what regrets he’s carrying from sixteen years ago.

“I have you to thank for Delilah’s resurgence, do I not? In your noble quest to stop the culling, too afraid to slit just one more throat.“ It’s not come up until now, the way he chose to deal with Delilah at Brigmore. The same path she took, trapping her aunt in a painting of her own brush — not of Emily's own hair, this time. Discussing the past never gets them anywhere. Only, it seems inevitable tonight.

It’s Daud who surprises her then. He stops just in front of her, grey eyes boring into hers. “Get out,” he orders.

“No.”

“Emily,” he growls, her name so foreign in his voice. He rarely addresses her at all, though certainly never as ‘Your Highness.’ As though forgoing the small detail of her abrupt ascension to the throne makes anything easier. Perhaps it does for him, but there is no other name she can call him by than the one he has. (She’s not calling him ‘Knife,’ as she knows the Whalers spoke of him. She wonders how he might look at her if she did.)

“Daud,” she returns. He doesn’t flinch.

“Not tonight,” he concedes — is it a concession, she thinks, if it’s spat at her with such ill grace? Still, it hangs between them.

“Tomorrow?” As if it’s the day marked on the calendar that plagues him as much as her, as if the passing of midnight on the grand clock behind them in the hall will take the pain away.

“Out,” he repeats, but his shoulders drop and his expression is that of a man who knows it’s the gallows in the morning.

She leaves.

* * *

He tests her patience, too — knows how to far too well. She knows he shouldn’t. She knows she shouldn’t let him.

* * *

“Surprise me,” he demands, when she insists she understands the plight of the common people better than he thinks.

She knows she’d like to, and she turns away before she can. Bows her head and returns to writing her speech instead.

* * *

She doesn’t like the new High Overseer much. Corvo and Daud both, she thinks, could stand to be more relaxed around the Abbeymen now, but of course they aren’t, either. Not when it’s her that still carries the Mark and Billie practically embodying the Void; even now that the Outsider is no longer the Void’s custodian and seemingly no-one else of note has deigned to notice.

“Let them come to you. You are far outnumbered in Holger Square,” Corvo argues.

“People accused of heresy have been _disappearing_ ,” she insists. She watches Daud from the corner of her eye. She will never know if the rumours regarding his mother are true. “And I’m not supposing to let them know I’m there,“ she adds.

“Perhaps you can continue your father’s legacy and brand one of them,” Daud grinds like breaking bone.

She turns to face him properly and their gazes lock. She feels the Void crow inside her at the suggestion. An excellent idea. She won’t take it — but she likes knowing that she could. Going by the look on Daud’s face, so does he.

* * *

“What do you know of regret?” he asks her again weeks later, holding her up against his side, helping her climb the steps to her quarters. Her leg is a mess of bruises following a spill off a rain-slick roof, and she’s not looking forward to Toksvig’s clicking tongue and Corvo’s disapproving look in the morning. Billie, at least, would ask her if she got what she came for first.

Emily doesn’t quite know why she thought it was a good idea to revive that particular conversation just then — perhaps because he couldn’t very well drop her leave her to her own devices. Well, he could. Emily feels rather too confident that he _wouldn’t_.

He could simply keep his mouth shut, however. He does, for the next few steps.

So does she, gritting her teeth against the pain, focusing instead on the strength of his grip on her waist and her wrist, her left arm slung around his shoulders. It’s his right that was injured, she recalls. She wonders if it twinges in bad weather, adding to an already impressive collection of aches and pains — the way Corvo’s old wounds do, the way she knows her own will one day. This leg, definitely, though not because of this.

“Enough to know I don’t want more of it,” she eventually replies, when they’ve made it to the landing. Just down the hall now. Daud adjusts his hold.

“Is that why you never listen to your father?“ he teases abruptly, marching — shuffling — them towards her room.

“And why were you still up, hm?” she deflects. He doesn’t need to know how often during the Coup she wished for Corvo’s guidance, remembering her adolescent insistences she knew what to do by herself, thank you very much, father.

Daud averts his face. She waits, sets one foot in front of the other.

“I noticed you were gone,” he says eventually.

Her stomach does something she’s come to associate with him saying things like that.

“How?” Did he happen to see her leave? If so, she’d have to be more careful — then again, he would know where to look.

“Came to talk to you. You weren’t to be found,” he answers, his eyes cutting towards her study where he’d inevitably sought her. She follows his gaze, then wanders over to the doors to her private chambers. Had he looked there, too? Or just knocked on the door and waited for an answer, cursing the loss of his second sight?

“And you didn’t raise the alarm?” She’s not serious.

“I know better than to worry about you,” he returns, so damned earnest it makes her blink. Then, he looks past her front, down at her leg. “Well,” he adds, far more eloquently than he ought to.

They’ve reached her bedchamber, and he sets her down with more care than she knows to expect of him. Then, he shocks her worse by bending a knee in front of her. He prods her foot, swollen at the ankle.

“Might yet get you out of it without ruining the boot,“ he rasps. Cutting her out of it, he means.

Still, with her knee twisted when she landed, she’s not looking forward to a game of tug-o’-war.

“Cut it,” she grits out. He raises his eyes to hers.

“You sure?”

She nods. He shrugs. Draws a knife from the sheath that is always strapped to his thigh and gets to it, working two fingers between her leg and the supple leather. She makes a face he can’t see, focused on the task she’s given him and that he’s accepted without protest.

It’s foolish, but she wishes she’d worn the old boots with the buckles. She likes these.

Oh so carefully, he draws the knife down along her calf, and it’s long seconds before she realises just who is taking a blade to her clothes in the dead of night. Does it to do her bidding after half-carrying her up the stairs.

From this angle, she can observe his hair, as it is more grey now than brown, his scar carving up his face. Is it paler now than she remembers it, or are her memories of that day washed in too much blood to be anything less than a pulsing, angry red?

Her contemplation of him, silent and complacent, takes a knife of her own making to these memories and slices through them as cleanly as he is doing with her shoe. She wonders if she’s freeing them both.

She won’t ask him.

She releases an involuntary breath when the pressure on her ankle eases, and it’s enough to make him look up at her. Assessing. Waiting, she realises, his knife back in its holster and his hand — his left, still — hovering above her leg.

Emily nods. Daud’s palm curves behind her then, settling into the groove at the back of her knee, and she’s neither frail nor petite, but his hand is still big enough to wrap around her almost entirely.

“Hold still,” he instructs, and then his other hand grasps the heel of her boot and, as though working apart the wedged-together parts of a machine, pulls. It’s quick and he’s gentle in a perfunctory sort of way, but gentle nonetheless, and there’s hardly more pain than there was already when he has her out of it. He sets the ruined footwear aside, making a sound that could be disappointment at seeing fine work go to waste. She wonders if he’s sparing a thought for the fact that she can easily afford a hundred new pairs in a day, and what he makes of such reminders of the Empire’s wealth these days, whether he knows that she considers none of it actually _hers_.

“Need any help?“ he asks her then, still angled up at her from his unlikely position at her feet — at her beck and call, the part of her that likes to see him squirm recalls, but she stowes the thought away. She shakes her head.

“Corvo can help me in the morning. Now, I just want to sleep.“

He nods, then stands, movements not as fluid as he might like them to be, and something rears its head inside her.

“ _You_ need any help?” she throws the joke at him as some noble might have done a glove at an adversary, only she’s not spoiling for a fight.

He seems to know, because his eyes crinkle, even if he doesn’t smile outright.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” he lobs back, sounding far too amused in light of her poking at his age. Older than Corvo, she reminds herself. (Then again, Billie calls him ‘old man’ about ten times a day.) “Good night,” he says then, turns and leaves without another word or glance, before she can think to thank him, and all at once she’s both alone and not. His smiling eyes remain with her.

* * *

The next morning, Corvo’s eyes narrow when Daud doesn’t need to ask why Emily’s foot is twice its usual size, when he nudges the ottoman it’s resting on with his own as he sits across from her and all she does is shrug.

“Toksvig says a week or so of rest and it’ll be fine,” Emily tells him what she’s been telling everybody else, and he nods.

“What’s the official line?” Daud asks her, and surely it’s more out of idle curiosity than any necessity of trotting out the ‘official line’ to anyone himself.

“Corvo and Toksvig are going to come up with something,” she returns lazily — she can afford to. Parliament is not in session and politics is quiet so close to the Fugue Feast. As such, no public appearances are scheduled for this week, and she’ll be well enough in a few days to conceal her injury from courtiers and advisors.

Daud smirks and disappears behind the Dunwall Courier. Corvo scowls and Emily raises a brow at him where Daud can’t see. He shrugs and returns to the papers on the table. Emily endeavours not to find any of this decidedly strange. Billie and the Outsider are out, exploring most likely, so they’re not there to judge; and Wyman isn’t returning to Gristol until next month — after the Feast. Emily’s half-glad for it, knowing how they fuss when she manages to hurt herself. Falling off a roof, no less, she winces.

* * *

Daud, entirely uncharacteristically, continues to be helpful. He and Billie run the patrols Emily can’t while her leg is healing, and she finds him still awake in the library more than once to see her return after she is well enough to go out again herself. He spars with her, or watches her train, taking over that part of Corvo’s _duties_ , as he keeps referring to them. At first, it unnerves her, but eventually she teaches herself not to overthink where she sticks her sword under his heavy gaze.

The Fugue passes, the city loose and colourful during that brief time when everything is permitted; and Emily watches the the fireworks from her bedroom window. She wonders, quite without wanting to, whether Daud ever had a purely silly, reckless thought in his life. If he ever had _fun_. If he ever yielded to temptation.

She writes to Wyman that night, eagerly anticipating their arrival a few weeks hence, and she knows they would indulge her in such speculation without guile. She should feel remorse for that, she supposes.

* * *

When Wyman arrives this time, Daud’s withdrawal is at once as conspicuous as it is irksome, and Emily denies she sees a pattern even as she counts the days until Billie tells her a report from one of Corvo’s contacts in the North is taking them out of the city. Well, her, but Emily knows Daud will follow.

She wants to confront him, to ask him outright if he’s running away. She has noticed no bad blood between him and Morley in general or Wyman in particular. And yet, if they argue less when Wyman’s with her these days, it’s because he’s hardly around. She doesn’t like it.

It makes little sense that she doesn’t.

* * *

‘This would be so much easier if I could get drunk,’ she thinks. Seventeen years. Two years. Two years to the day since Delilah tore her world apart and set Dunwall aflame, leaving it to burn until all that was left was a blackened husk.

She doesn’t get drunk because she can’t, and she doesn’t cry because she won’t let herself. She doesn’t seek out Daud to take him to task over his continued absence.

* * *

Wyman is barely gone a week before Daud annoys her so thoroughly at dinner that she holds out for barely half an hour before following him upstairs after he’s retired from the library.

“You know better,” is all he tells her when he opens the door to her — still, he steps aside and lets her inside.

“So do you,” she gripes as she closes it behind her. He doesn’t comment. It’s too easy, she decides then. To want his attention, and to have it up until the moment he takes it away.

“Why do you hate Wyman?“ It’s a silly thing to ask, perhaps, far too dramatic — a man like Daud isn’t given to hatred as he is to contempt, but he tends to reserve it for the Abbey, for nobles who would see the poor starve to keep a hold of their own coin. Wyman, certainly, does not merit either.

“What?” he rebukes accordingly, cold as stone.

“You vanish when they arrive, and then you act as though nothing happened once they’re gone again,” she analyses neatly, because she’s rolled the thought around in her mind so often it’s as smooth as a rock from a riverbed. “They haven’t done anything to offend you, so what in the Void is your problem?“

“There’s no problem,” he grits like sandpaper.

“Clearly,” she mimics his tone, only drenched in sarcasm that is all hers, but he doesn’t take the bait; continues sorting the books on his desk instead. “Daud,” she demands then, demands his attention, and she might as well have stomped her foot for all that he has the gall to glower at her.

“You have me,“ he snipes. “Now what?”

What was _that_ supposed to mean?

“Clearly, I don’t,” she says, pushing past her own confusion, “if I can’t keep you and Wyman in the same room for longer than five minutes.”

“And why should you want to?“ His question is precise. Her answers, as far as she has them, far less so. At her silence, he nods, as if she’d preemptively agreed with whatever foregone conclusion he’ll no doubt present to her if she lets him talk.

So she doesn’t. She steps up to him instead, curves an arm around his neck and braces herself against his chest with the other, levers herself up until his cruel mouth is sealed with hers.

Daud falls into her as though breaking through the too-thin ice on a frozen lake. She feels him move against her as he drops the books and brings his hands to her back instead, holding her to him as his mouth learns hers with startling determination. He lets up on her far too soon, pulls back, puts a distance between their faces that is belied by his chest curving under her hand.

“You _have_ me,” he repeats. “Isn’t that enough?”

She nods. For the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> Title nicked from Hozier's lovely little song, _Run_.


End file.
